added news about the Botnar project final review

Author: ccattuto

_news/2024-10-10-botnarproject-final.md

@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@
+---
+layout: news_item
+title: 'Completion of the COVID-19 Pathfinder project funded by Fondation Botnar'
+date: '2024-10-10 09:00:00'
+slug: botnar-project-final
+---
+
+Today, the COVID-19 Pathfinder project funded by <a href="https://www.fondationbotnar.org" target="_blank">Fondation Botnar</a> came to an and after a successful final review meeting. Over the course of the last 4 years, the project, led by EPFL, supported the development of Digital Contact Tracing technologies, in particular the <a href="https://github.com/DP-3T/documents" target="_blank">Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (DP-3T)</a> protocol that was the base for <a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/04/apple-and-google-partner-on-covid-19-contact-tracing-technology/" target="_blank">Apple and Google's Exposure Notifiation</a> technology adopted by several COVID-19 national apps worldwide.
+
+The project also supported the development of wearable proximity sensors based on Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) technology, that affords  more accurate distance measurements than attenuation-based systems. The sensor hardware was developed by <a href="https://www.3db-access.com" target="_blank">3db Access</a> and the sensor firmware was developed at ISI Foundation based on the SocioPatterns firmware components.
+<figure class="sp-figure">
+  <a href="/assets/img/wpp_sensor.jpg">
+    <img 
+      src="/assets/img/wpp_sensor.jpg"
+      alt=""
+      loading="lazy"
+    >
+  </a>
+</figure>
+The new generation of UWB-based sensors were deployed and validated in a <a href="https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2024/02/finding-and-blocking-infection-routes-in-hospitals.html" target="_blank">hospital technical pilot</a> in Switzerland. After that, we deployed the well-tested SocioPatterns attenuation-based sensors alongiside the new UWB-based sensors in 4 1-day studies: households in Kenya (about 100 participants), households in Côte d'Ivoire (65 participants), a hospital in Kenya (100 participants) and a hospital in Côte d'Ivoire (100 participants). These data collection will allow us to carry out extensive comparison of the performance of attenuation-based vs UWB-based proximity sensors in real-world environments of interest for digital contact tracing applications and for trasnmission studies of infectious diseases.
+
+The deployments in Kenya and Côte d'Ivoire were used as a technology probes to investigate user-oriented and social aspects of digital contact tracing, identifying  barriers to adoption and emphasizing the need for culturally sensitive wearable devices. The results of this study were published at the <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713817" target="_blank">2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems</a>.